way it would just silt up
ht, like a Main Beach or
k, you know where you
hthanders out the back
gutter - it’ll just do that”
If Straddie was destroyed as a surf break,
would it put pressure on other breaks
with hundreds of surfers being forced to
perhaps pile in their cars and say head to
Burleigh or Currumbin even?
“Firstly there’s no parking (laughs), yet the
Gold Coast is promoted as a ‘surf scene’ and
the northern beaches are a high icon area
of our surfing. They’ve kind of disregarded
that, and they just look at Snapper and all
that, and push the Quiksilver Pro and Surfing
Queensland bullshit all down the southern
end, but the northern end is really iconic
and gee ... I mean we’ve already lost the
seaway, but if South Straddie went it would
be devastating to that end of the coast.”
Do you think the consortium and
developers can truly understand how
dynamic and powerful the ocean is around
that area?
“I don’t know if these engineers have actually
looked at it, and when this place first started,
there were guys getting barrels, I mean
there’s 8 to 10 foot waves right fucken there,
you know what I mean? I don’t think they
realise all of that.”
And how about that crazy wave in the
seaway, you know a lot of people still don’t
know about it, how was it when it broke
for the few first years of the seaway?
“It would kind of come in and hit about three
quarters out along the groyne on the northern
side, and then break for about a third of the
length of the wall, but the good thing about
it was that it would break on a kind of angle
where it was coming back at you, and we
always imagined it was kind of like the Bowl,
when it started to barrel it had the Ala Moana
thing. A lot of times it was a big fathander,
but a lot of times too, you’d get the right day
and the right guys could possibly source out
a barrel. I was lucky enough to get a few on
that day (of the cover shot).
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